docs-desktop/dotnet-desktop-guide/framework/winforms/advanced/how-to-manually-manage-buffered-graphics.md

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title	ms.date	dev_langs	helpviewer_keywords	ms.assetid
How to: Manually Manage Buffered Graphics	03/30/2017	csharp vb	flicker [Windows Forms], reducing by manually managing graphics graphics [Windows Forms], managing buffered	4c2a90ee-bbbe-4ff6-9170-1b06c195c918

How to: Manually Manage Buffered Graphics

For more advanced double buffering scenarios, you can use the .NET Framework classes to implement your own double-buffering logic. The class responsible for allocating and managing individual graphics buffers is the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext class. Every application has its own default xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext that manages all of the default double buffering for that application. You can retrieve a reference to this instance by calling the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsManager.Current%2A.

To obtain a reference to the default BufferedGraphicsContext

• Set the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsManager.Current%2A property, as shown in the following code example.

  [!code-csharpSystem.Windows.Forms.LegacyBufferedGraphics#11] [!code-vbSystem.Windows.Forms.LegacyBufferedGraphics#11]

  Note

  You do not need to call the Dispose method on the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext reference that you receive from the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsManager class. The xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsManager handles all of the memory allocation and distribution for default xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext instances.

  For graphically intensive applications such as animation, you can sometimes improve performance by using a dedicated xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext instead of the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext provided by the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsManager. This enables you to create and manage graphics buffers individually, without incurring the performance overhead of managing all the other buffered graphics associated with your application, though the memory consumed by the application will be greater.

To create a dedicated BufferedGraphicsContext

• Declare and create a new instance of the xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext class, as shown in the following code example.

  [!code-csharpSystem.Windows.Forms.LegacyBufferedGraphics#12] [!code-vbSystem.Windows.Forms.LegacyBufferedGraphics#12]

See also

• xref:System.Drawing.BufferedGraphicsContext
• Double Buffered Graphics
• How to: Manually Render Buffered Graphics